CURRENTS. A Journal of Young English Philology Thought and Review, vol.1, no.1/2015 Ed. by E. Bodal, A. Jaskólska, N. Strehlau & M. Włudzik, www.currents.umk.pl ISSN 2449-8769 || All texts licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Tanja Reiffenrath University of Paderborn
“I AM AVERAGE BECAUSE…” UNRELIABILITY AND THE (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF NORMALCY Keywords: unreliable narration, mental illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social constructivism, Georges Canguilhem
Introduction: Mental Illness – A Standard Case? 1 Over the course of many years, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, the narrator of Steve Martin’s novel The Pleasure of My Company, has created a lifestyle outside the lines of the “normal” and within the limits of his obsessive-compulsive disorder: his “travel options” are not “open” anymore (POMC 6) and finding a job is “a tad difficult given the poor design of the streets” (POMC 5). Stories recounted by mentally ill narrators have long been considered prime examples of unreliable narration, a narratological concept that has, as Tom Kindt and Tilmann Köppe purport, long become one of the key questions of literary analyses and continues to spur keen debates in the narratological community (1). Yet current academic discourse tends to neglect these “madmen” in favor of allegedly more complex models of untrustworthiness and self-deception. In this paper, I wish to redirect the focus to mentally ill narrators, such as Daniel, as their narration will shed light on the triadic relationship between the narrator, the reader, and their assumptions about normalcy. I will argue that the motif of “acting vs. being” serves as the narrator’s means to control both other characters’ and the reader’s emotional responses to his unreliability, and by extension, to his psychological state, thereby offering a brief glimpse into an alternative form of normalcy. Ultimately, it is Daniel’s aim to make himself appear sympathetic2, an aspect that profoundly impacts the construction of the “normal” in the story-world. My approach to the text is a combination of the rhetorical perspective that studies markers of unreliability as textual
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phenomena and the cognitivist perspective that includes the reader’s direct inferences from their own values and knowledge of the world3 (cf. Hansen 242). Wayne Booth, who coined the term “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 seminal study Rhetoric of Fiction, attributes unreliable narration to the relationship between the narrator and the implied author: if the narrator does not speak for or does not act according to the norms of the work, i.e. those of the implied author, the narrator is considered to be unreliable (158f.). However, numerous critics have found fault with this definition, criticising it as vague, tautological and too heavily indebted to the concept of the implied author, an “anthropomorphized phantom” (Nünning 55). In the light of the “cognitive turn” in literary studies, recent theories on unreliable, untrustworthy and fallible narrators extend beyond text-immanent models to include the reader’s perception of the narrator. For this reason, in his essay “Unreliable, Compared to What,” Ansgar Nünning stresses the reader’s constructivist approach to the text and arrives at a new definition, stating that “[u]nreliable narrators are those whose perspective is in contradiction to the value and norm system of the whole text or to that of the reader” (59). As a consequence, the reader’s attention is directed to the discrepancy between the narrator’s perspective and the reader’s world-view (61). In this respect, assumptions about normalcy, normativity, and sympathy increase in relevance. It should be noted that Daniel, the narrator, does not represent the “most typical case of narratorial unreliability” outlined by Monika Fludernik in her essay “Defining (In)Sanity” when she characterizes mentally ill narrators as either unaware of their own obsessions or suffering from epistemological distortions when it comes to the events in the storyworld (77). Although the narrator’s obsessions and compulsions are indeed overwhelming, he is by no means unaware of this. In fact, Daniel shows meta-cognitive awareness, taking on the role of a mediator who is capable of evaluating his own pathological behavior, thereby creating a bridge for the reader’s understanding. As a consequence, Booth’s argument that unreliability serves as an adequate textual 145
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strategy to confuse readers and instill in them a feeling of uncertainty (cf. 378), does not apply to the novel. Nevertheless, his consideration of the potential emotional impact of unreliable stories is of utmost significance for their interpretation and reverberates throughout his study, as Claudia Hillebrandt so aptly notes when, in a critical reading of his theory, she outlines further emotional responses implicit in Booth’s analyses, such as outrage or a feeling of suspense (20).4 However, readers are most likely to experience such feelings only when they have difficulties in discovering textual signals of unreliability or where these signals are introduced late in the narrative (21). Readers’ responses to an unreliability that is clearly established in the beginning of a story, as is the case in The Pleasure of My Company, will thus be different. After all, the title of Martin’s book already bespeaks the sense of “pleasure” or joy readers are presumed to feel in Daniel’s company. The narrative therefore invites an interpretation of the responses to unreliability within the framework Ronny Bläß has devised: according to him, unreliable narration may function to trigger not only negative responses, but also more positive ones, such as the delight readers may feel in puzzling over the events in the narrative or in attempting to construe alternative discourses and, finally, the manipulation of the readers’ emotional involvement with characters in the storyworld (198). In the following essay I aim to show how Daniel’s unreliable narration functions to subvert the traditional concept of “normalcy” and instead proposes a notion of the “normal” that is tightly intertwined with the idea that those who are liked are accepted. Constructing Normalcy At the beginning of the novel, the narrator introduces his story by stating that “[t]his all started because of a clerical error” (POMC 1). Interestingly, “this all” does not refer to the narrator’s illness, but, as it soon becomes obvious to the reader, to a series of seemingly random events that lead to the cure of the narrator’s disorder and the happy ending of the novel. The clerical error also 146
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refers to the mistake that was made when Daniel’s application at the International Society of Geniuses was processed and he was found to be less than a genius. What is striking here is the fact that from the beginning of the novel the boundary between the normal and the extraordinary is highlighted. Right when it becomes clear that Daniel appears not to be extraordinary and is thus refused membership, he reveals his mental disorder to the reader: I find it difficult—ok, impossible—to cross the street at the corners. The symmetry of two scooped-out driveways facing each other makes a lot of sense to me. I see other people crossing and I don’t know how they can do it. Isn’t a curb forbidding? An illogical elevation imposing itself between the street and the sidewalk? Crosswalks make so much sense, but laid between two ominous curbs they might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Who designed this? Daffy Duck? (POMC 2–3)
Through explanations such as this one, Daniel attempts to justify his inability to cross curbs by creating an image of superiority and insisting on his sanity. He bases his reasoning on rationality and normativity, which becomes evident in the words “forbidding,” “illogical,” and “sense” which, in his argumentation, are opposed to the comic figure Daffy Duck, an opposition that highlights the ridiculousness of the street design. At the same time, the narrator distances himself from the reader, whose frame of reference is not only disrupted by Daniel’s claim that he is incapable of crossing curbs, but also by his reversal of logic and normativity and the formal language he employs to ridicule others, including his readership. It should be noted that although Daniel sees himself as opposed to “other” people in this passage, he is well aware that he is the “other” in society, when, for instance, he claims that Brian, a neighbor he occasionally talks to who is able to cross streets in spite of the curbs, is his “closest link to normalcy” (POMC 47).
This
statement exposes
the
factual
contradictions
in
Daniel’s
representation of his own position in the storyworld. As a result, the reader is inclined to doubt Daniel’s value system. Moreover, the definition of what is “normal” is unsettled early in the narrative, for, on the one hand, Daniel presents his own version of what is normal, reasonable, and acceptable, while
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on the other hand, the story also suggests that a conflicting version of the “normal” is defined by the narrator’s environment—perhaps the reader’s “closest link to normalcy” in the book. It is particularly the latter form of normalcy that deserves attention, for it is not only normative, as one might expect, but also depicted as flexible and intricately intertwined with Daniel’s environment, his interactions with others (even if they are troublesome at times) and the ways in which people live. The idea that pathology is not simply located in an individual organism, but instead surfaces in its relationships to the environment, is at the heart of Georges Canguilhem’s theory (cf. e.g. 188). The French physician and philosopher now ranks as one of the most important thinkers in medical epistemology and is today seen as a father figure for a number of influential philosophers of science and historians of thought, amongst them most prominently Michel Foucault (cf. also Geroulanos 281)5. In his seminal study The Normal and the Pathological, first published in 1943 as his doctoral dissertation, Canguilhem enunciates an extensive critique of the concepts of the “normal” and the “pathological,” as well as their relation to normality, norms, and health. Consequently, the history of science is in Canguilhem’s work grasped in terms of an incessant conflict between the descriptive and the normative (Horton 317). While most (though not all) of his arguments rest on an understanding of medical pathology in the context of physical diseases, they may well be extended to a discussion of psychological disorders, precisely because of the malleability he credits normality with. Furthermore, as Victoria Margree has outlined, even the distinction between mental and physical health becomes problematic when health and pathology are grasped in the individual’s relation to the environment (305)6. In his chapter on “A Critical Examination of Certain Concepts,” Canguilhem begins by tracing the origins of the term “normal” to “norma,” the “standard” or “rule.” Hence what is “normal” is also “regular” and, as a consequence, “normal” is first of all “that which is such that it ought to be.” Secondly, “normal” is “that 148
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which is met with in the majority of cases […] or that which constitutes either the average or standard of a measureable characteristic” (125). Not only do these traditional approaches to normality pose theoretical problems— normality is here established statistically by referring to population data, an aspect that, as Horton rightfully claims, turns pathology or disease into a quantitative issue, “an excess or deficit of a particular variable” (317)—but they cannot account for the normality in the novel, either, which becomes obvious through the narrator’s brief assessment of the setting: “Santa Monica, where I live, is a perfect town for invalids, homosexuals, show people, and all other formerly peripheral members of society. Average is not the norm here” (POMC 7). The use of the word “formerly” indicates that all previously marginalised groups are now a part of society, an observation that may open up the possibility for the construction of an alternative kind of normalcy, one that does not rely on a common standard and ultimately does not adhere to traditional notions of normativity. Nevertheless, this superficial construction of an alternative concept of normalcy is too far removed from the reader’s frame of reference to allow the reader to become fully immersed in the storyworld and accept the narrator’s contradictory reasoning. Additionally, the narrator’s initial attitude toward the reader functions as a further hindrance to the reader’s full immersion into the storyworld, since Greta Olson asserts that when readers encounter narrators, they treat them like they would treat new acquaintances, using implicit theories of personality and forming expectations on the basis of how narrators usually behave (99). Throughout the entire course of the novel there are scenes in which the narrator addresses the reader directly, yet often in an unsettling manner, for example when, after revealing the nature of his disorder, Daniel assumes that the reader is “thinking [he is] either brilliant or a murder suspect. Why not both?” (POMC 3). He then immediately adds “I’m just teasing you” (POMC 3), a tongue-in-cheek statement that nevertheless plays with the reader’s trust in the narrator’s account and also hints at the sense of control 149
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that Daniel cherishes, both in his everyday life and his narration. As a result, the usual contract between the writer and the reader is broken and may best be described with James Phelan’s concept of “estranging unreliability” which assumes that distance is created between narrator and reader once the reader realises that adopting the perspective of the narrator would entail giving up parts of their value system (225). Interestingly though, Daniel aims at the opposite: his subsequent attempts to explain himself to the reader also serve the function of making himself appear sympathetic and hence draw attention to the narrator’s interaction with his environment. Moreover, the novel does not connect normalcy with what may in Daniel’s case be the most obvious—health. Unlike the characters in other illness narratives, Daniel does not desire health, does not take therapy seriously, and happily spends his days living on the money provided by his grandmother. Instead, the ‘normal’ is defined as what is liked or loved. Yet the narrator does not only strive to make himself appear likeable to other characters, but also attempts to draw readers into a tight and sympathetic relationship, an issue that I will elucidate in the following section by exploring the motif of “acting vs. being.” Acting vs. Being Since Daniel does not consider himself very likeable in his current situation, he arrives at the conclusion that acting will make him appear more sympathetic, first and foremost to other characters, and, in the process of making his acting transparent, also to the reader. Strikingly, there is a great difference for him between the ideas of “acting like himself,” as he is told to do when he guest stars in a TV show, and acting like someone else. “I have a tough time being myself” (POMC 7), he explains, arguing that naturally this makes it impossible to even try to act like himself. The idea of acting like someone else is therefore, first of all, to be seen as a comforting and strengthening escape from his obsessive-compulsive self that allows him to—theoretically—seduce several 150
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women at the same time: “I would act older than I am if I were with Elizabeth, and I would act younger than I am if I were with Zandy the pharmacist” (POMC 15). This disclosure reveals that the commonly employed metaphor of unreliable narration of something that happens “behind the narrator’s back” (Nünning 57) cannot account for Daniel’s status as a narrator. Instead of being excluded from the communication process between the implied author and the implied reader, the narrator himself constitutes the source of deception and gradually establishes a direct and open relationship with the reader in which he makes his strategies transparent. What is more, he turns the reader into an accomplice of sorts and explicitly discloses when he acts in front of other characters in order to make them fall for him. Daniel’s acting finally even goes so far as to create an alter ego in order to take part in an essay-writing competition twice (not with the aim to win, but simply to have more time to watch Zandy at work). Ironically, his task there is to present himself as an average American which he accomplishes by writing two contradictory essays. In the first one he presents himself in an exaggerated fashion as an individual, a “pioneer,” and an extraordinary person: I am average because […] I stand on the seashore here in Santa Monica and I let the Pacific Ocean touch my toes, and I know I am at the most western edge of our nation, and that I am a descendant of the settlers who came to California as pioneers. And is not every American a pioneer? […] I am average […] because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood…. (POMC 10)
Daniel’s second essay, however, reveals a contradictory line of argumentation when he constructs his identity as an ordinary member of society by stating that “America lets me choose not to be a pioneer. I am uplifted by doing ordinary work. The work of society, the common work of the world…” (POMC 25). Both essays are eventually chosen for the final round of the competition, adding to the impression that the average and normal is not defined in terms of the ordinary vs. the extraordinary, but rather relies on some sort of a commonly accepted connection to American life, perhaps, in other words: a likeable, sympathetic fellow American. Lennard Davis asserts that once the 151
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normal is established as an imperative, it is paradoxically granted the status of an ideal (12). Hence, Daniel’s acting also constitutes a strategy to achieve this idealistic image. Daniel even observes that what makes writing these essays challenging is not a problem of “being average,” but one of coming across as ‘likeable’ (POMC 9). In this vein, Daniel’s stories within the story, a common meta-fictional technique, serve as a commentary on the story-telling process, thereby alluding to the artificiality of stories and thus self-consciously underlining the motif of “acting.” It is at this point that the narrator’s acts of deception, lying and pretending in front of other characters are cast in a different light and receive the reader’s acceptance. “I knew I had to flatter, overdo, and lay it on thick,” Daniel admits, arguing that he himself would rather prefer a flawed but natural person to the “sniveling, patriotic me” (POMC 9). Yet it becomes clear that when appearing publicly, such a person would “straighten up” (POMC 10) in order to meet standard expectations. According to Phelan, the narrator’s unreliability may also have a paradoxical effect on the reader when the latter recognises unreliability, yet feels drawn into an affective and ethical relationship with the narrator (225). This is most frequently the case when the reader detects some underlying truth to the narrator’s unreliable actions and statements (227). By exposing normalcy as an idealistic concept, the narrator thus succeeds in merging his own value system with that of the reader who cannot help but agree. Inevitably, the issue of mental health as constitutive of normalcy eventually does enter the narrative that otherwise glosses over the narrator’s disorder in innocent and humorous tones. Over the course of the story, Daniel’s efforts to come across as likeable become stronger than his disorder, which becomes evident in the fact that he only notices the contradictory nature of his essay when he finds himself in the stressful situation of reading it aloud on stage: “I am average because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood?” I am average because I am unique? My tricky little phrases, meant to sound compelling, actually had no meaning. All my life an inner 152
CURRENTS. A Journal of Young English Philology Thought and Review semanticist had tried to sniff out and purge my brain of these twisted constructions, yet here I was, center stage with one dangling off my lips like an uneaten noodle. (POMC 119)
Although he is obviously disgusted by his logical lapse, as the simile of the “uneaten noodle” hanging from his lips and spoiling the impression of the “straightened up” fellow vividly illustrates, he reminds himself that the façade needs to be maintained, as the audience wants to be “enthralled, not lectured” (POMC 120), hence he needs to continue acting. At the end of the novel, Daniel is finally successful in making himself likeable and even loved. Yet a remarkable twist in the narrative reveals that he does not achieve this through acting, but simply through being, as Zandy explains that she fell in love with him because of the “‘the way you were […]’” (POMC 161). The reader is then left with a deus-ex-machina ending that could not be more conventional and happy: Zandy proves to be the love of the narrator’s life and a prolepsis shows that they end up having a child and most of Daniel’s obsessions seem to be cured. Nevertheless, I refuse to read the happy ending of the novel as a reconciliation of the self, in which Daniel’s “being” is accepted, since he is cheerfully forced to change the way he “is”: With a cheery delicacy [Zandy] divided my obsessions into three categories: acceptable, unacceptable, and hilarious. The unacceptable ones were those that inhibited life, like the curbs. […] The other intolerable ones she simply vetoed, and I was able to adjourn them, or convert them into a mistrust of icebergs. (POMC 161)
Zandy assumes an authority in Daniel’s life that clearly defines what is acceptable and what is not, thus establishing a normative framework for the narrator’s life. This framework is geared towards notions of health, effectively relocating pathology and health in the individual organism, since eventually Daniel is forced to let go of his obsessive-compulsive behavior on Zandy’s veto, an utterly brief description of a seemingly uncomplicated recovery. The ending of the novel ultimately abandons the alternative and more inclusive concept proposed throughout the story and returns to the traditional
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understanding of normality, which is an understanding, Canguilhem explains, tightly intertwined with the normative: When we know that norma is the Latin word for T-square and that normalis means perpendicular, we know almost all that must be known about the area in which the meaning of the terms ‘norm’ and ‘normal’ originated […]. To set a norm is to normalize, is to impose a requirement on an existence […]. A norm offers itself as a possible mode of unifying diversity, resolving a difference, settling a disagreement. (Canguilhem 239; italics in original)
Zandy imposes order on the narrator’s life by strictly limiting the pathological quirks he is still allowed to exhibit to an absolute minimum. Normalcy then indeed becomes the epitome of an efficient and stable life that is able to reproduce itself (144). Although this conceptualisation of normality and health seems to be quite idealised, it does in fact fit the change in the narrator’s mental and physical life literally. Finally, it is also worthwhile to return to another of Canguilhem’s thoughts, namely the traditional conception of normality as presenting “the average or standard” (125). Even though Daniel is later on offered to retake the application test at the International Society of Geniuses, because they admit having made a mistake, he refuses and instead chooses to return to work, no longer relying on his grandmother’s support. If one conceives of his obsessivecompulsive, hence pathological, behavior as one end of a scale and extreme intelligence as the other end, then the narrator does indeed locate his self in the middle, amongst the average, in a kind of normalcy that matches the reader’s frame of reference. This happy ending exposes a set of problems, since it is one in which normalcy is imposed on the narrator through other characters in the storyworld and, by extension, also through the relationship with the reader. The ending suggests that mental illness may simply be “vetoed” and transcended by the sheer force of willpower, perpetuating a stigmatising view on psychological conditions. The Pleasure of My Company therefore leaves readers with the culturally preferred narrative—a triumphant love-conquers-
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all story in which health and normalcy in the conventional sense are restored7 and the narrator emerges as a productive and full-fledged member of society. Conclusion Throughout the narrative, Daniel’s unreliable narration offered brief glimpses into an alternative, more inclusive form of normalcy and invited readers to adjust their value systems accordingly through the recurring motif of “acting vs. being.” By means of acting and pretending, the narrator attempts to make others like him—other characters in the story-world, and, most importantly for the purpose of this essay, the reader. With the reader the narrator enters a close relationship when his unreliable actions and statements shift from an estranged and ambiguous perception to fulfill a bonding function. Normalcy is then exposed as an idealistic concept that the narrator can only attain through lying, an argument that does reveal a general truth and therefore enables the reader to feel sympathetic toward the obsessive-compulsive narrator. The ending of the story, however, restores a more normative concept of normalcy. Normalcy then no longer refers to the idea of being liked and therefore accepted, but is eventually indeed linked to health and the need for a cure. In this process, the narrator is normalised by Zandy, whose disciplining alludes to the processes outlined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Normalisation, Foucault claims, “becomes one of the great instruments of power” (184). Normalcy, his critical commentaries elucidate, is by no means a neutral space, but one in which individuals (and note Foucault’s negative conception of the term individual, e.g. 193f.) are forced to comply and adjust. Yet the ways in which normalisation operates have been naturalised (cf. also Stammberger 158) and rendered invisible, so that they may remain unexamined and unquestioned. Daniel’s unreliable narration, though, briefly turns the gaze on an alternative concept of normalcy and readers, as my reading of the novel has shown, assume a significant role in joining the narrator in his challenge of the conventional form of normality and are asked to adjust 155
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their value systems. Nevertheless, the only means to merge the diverging value systems of the unreliable narrator and the reader appears to be the plain superimposition of the reader’s notion of normalcy, an act which other characters in the storyworld may carry out. Even though the ending of the narrative, through its suddenness and artificiality, helps to shed light on the seemingly natural process of normalisation, it nonetheless powerfully restores normality and health in the conventional sense, complying with the reader’s frame of reference. Under these circumstances it is questionable if—and how— the communication process between the unreliable narrator and the reader may incorporate the tolerance necessary for dealing with deviant and pathological narrators and their stories, a problem that certainly calls for narrators that continue to challenge our frames of reference and our ideas of normalcy. Endnotes 1. A part of following article has been presented at the Postgraduate Forum of the German Association for American Studies in November 2011. I thank the Currents editors and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on the manuscript. 2. Although sympathy for a fictional character is constitutive of an empathic engagement, I will focus solely on sympathy, defined as feeling for a character in the storyworld (cf. Giovannelli 83–85). 3. When unreliability is treated as a textual phenomenon, it is understood to be encoded by the implied author and decoded by the implied reader. The cognitivist and constructivist approach, on the other hand, focuses on actual readers’ processes of interpretation. For a concise introduction to the history of these approaches, please see D. Shen, “Unreliability.” 4. Both Booth and Hillebrandt refer to pivotal examples of unreliability here, namely Nabokov’s Lolita and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 5. The reception of Canguilhem’s work outside France has been scarce for many years, but began to increase in the 1990s. Please cf. the review essay by Geroulanous on Canguilhem’s now burgeoning reception in France and the U.S. for more details and further literature. 6. Next to Margree’s insightful discussion of Canguilhem’s thought and its implications for psychiatry, the volume Alentour de Canguilhem: L’envers de la Raison (The Opposite of Reason: Around Canguilhem), edited by Pierre F. Daled, explores other points of contact between psychiatry and psychological pathology and Canguilhem’s conceptual
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CURRENTS. A Journal of Young English Philology Thought and Review framework through a historical perspective. Please see Geroulanos’s review essay for a detailed discussion of the volume (299ff.). 7. For a thorough discussion of the so-called “triumph narrative,” please see especially Kathlyn Conway’s Illness and the Limits of Expression and Thomas G. Couser’s Signifying Bodies. References Bläß, R. 2005. “Satire, Sympathie und Skeptizismus. Funktionen unzuverlässigen Erzählens,” in: F. Liptay & Y. Wolf (Eds.), 188–203. Booth, W. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canguilhem, G. 2007. The Normal and the Pathological. 5th ed. New York: Zone Books. Conway, K. 2007. Illness and the Limits of Expression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Couser, T. 2010. Signifying Bodies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Daled, P.F. (Ed.) 2008. Alentour de Canguilhem: L’envers de la Raison [The Opposite of Reason: Around Canguilhem]. Paris: Vrin. Davis, L.J. (Ed.) 1997. The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Davis, L.J. 1997. “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in: L.J. Davis (Ed.), 9–28. Fludernik, M. 1999. “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Question of Unreliability,” in: W. Grünzweig & A. Solbach (Eds.), 75–95. Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Geroulanos, S. 2009. “Beyond the Normal and the Pathological: Recent Literature on Georges Canguilhem.” Gesnerus 66:2, 288–306. Giovannelli, A. 2009. “In Sympathy with Narrative Characters.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67:1, 83–95. Grünzweig, W. & A. Solbach (Eds.) 1999. Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context. Tübingen: Gunther Narr. Hansen, P.K. 2007. “Reconsidering the Unreliable Narrator.” Semiotica 165:1, 227-246. Hillebrandt, C. 2011. “Emotional Functions of Unreliable Narratives An Outline for Future Research.” Journal of Literary Theory 5:1, 19–36. Horton, R. 1995. “Georges Canguilhem: Philosopher of Disease.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 88, 316–319. Hühn, P. et al. (Eds.). 2011. The Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn.unihamburg.de. DOA 15.08.2012. Kindt, T. & T. Köppe. 2011. “Preface.” Journal of Literary Theory 5:1, 1–2. Liptay, F. & Y. Wolf (Eds.). 2005. Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film. München: Edition Text+Kritik. Margree, V. 2002. “Normal and Abnormal: Georges Canguilhem and the Question of Mental Pathology.” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology 9:4, 299–312. Martin, S. 2003. The Pleasure of My Company. New York: Hyperion.
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CURRENTS, vol.1, no.1 / 2015 Nünning, A. 1999. “Unreliable, Compared to What: Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomina and Hypotheses,” in: W. Grünzweig & A. Solbach (Eds.), 53–74. Olson, G. 2003. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative 11:1, 93–109. Phelan, J. 2007. “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita,” Narrative 15:2, 222–238. Shen, D. 2011. “Unreliability,” in: P. Hühn et al. (Eds.). http://www.lhn.unihamburg.de/article/unreliability. DOA 15.08.2012. Stammberger, B. 2011. Monster und Freaks: Eine Wissensgeschichte außergewöhnlicher Körper im 19. Jhd. Bielefeld: transcript. Abstract Stories recounted by mentally ill narrators have long been considered prime examples of unreliable narration. Yet in the light of the “cognitive turn” in literary studies, recent theories on unreliable narrators extend beyond text-immanent models to include the reader’s perception of the narrator. In this respect, assumptions about normalcy are particularly relevant. It is my aim to analyse the obsessive-compulsive narrator Daniel in Steve Martin’s humorous novel The Pleasure of My Company (2003), who aims at reconstructing the definition of normalcy. I want to show how the motif of “acting vs. being,” which permeates the novel, serves as the narrator’s means to control the reader’s perception in an attempt to present himself as “normal,” i.e. “likeable.” Yet my analysis reveals that the characters’ and the reader’s normative notions about health eventually dominate, undermine the narrator’s strategy and drive the plot to a deus-exmachina ending that fully reestablishes conventional normalcy.
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